7 Freely available E-Books/Guides I found essential for .NET Programmers and Architects

By Anoop Madhusudanan

A lot of people ask me for good book recommendations. Hence, for some time, I was thinking about compiling a quick list of useful free E-Books for .NET programmers and budding architects. Most of us start our programming career as a ‘casual’ programmer – My own definition about a ‘Casual’ coder is a guy who can code, but who is least concerned/interested about the beauty, efficiency, extensibility and readability of the code he writes. Some of these books will definitely help us to evolve our coding skills and thought processes for developing better solutions. Hope you find this list useful, here we go.

Foundations Of Programming

The Foundation Of Programming Series Free e-book By Karl Seguin is one of my favorites. It is simple, short and sweet. Especially for ‘casual’ programmers, this will give a better thought process – that’ll definitely enable them to code better and think better. This book covers the ALT.NET Philosophy, Domain Driven Development concepts, DI, TDD etc in a nice way. This book is close to my heart.

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition

Published by Microsoft, this is an essential read for any Microsoft.NET developer or Architect to understand the underlying architecture and design principles and patterns for developing successful solutions on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework. This guide neatly covers popular architecture patterns, best practices and common challenges you need to understand for developing .NET applications. Get a good grip on developing enterprise applications in .NET.

Rob Miles C# Yellow Book 2010

A nice action packed book that takes you through C# and .NET concepts. This book explains C# language and .NET library in general – with a clear focus on implementation thought process and best practices.

Threading in C#

A short, neatly written book from Joe Albahari about Threading in C#. This is a must read for any .NET programmer to understand more about threading in general, thread pooling, synchronization, Non blocking synchronization, etc. In this book, Joe even covers the Parallel Framework Extensions and Parallel programming in .NET

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

This guide is again from Microsoft, and focuses on designing your applications with Performance and scalability in mind. It has sections relevant to architects, developers, testers, and administrators. Following the checklists and guidance in this book will ensure that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises in the end. Read this guide if you develop Enterprise applications in .NET

Applying Design Patterns

This is a quick introduction towards the thought process of applying design patterns. The objective of the book is to introduce design patterns in a simple way, so that developers can understand some common patterns and how to apply them. I wrote that some time back ;)

RefCardz from DZone

DZone has a number of awesome Ref Cardz (Quick reference sheets) on multiple technologies. You can go to DZone –> RefCardz to browse and download them (after getting a free DZone Id). Here are some of my recent favorites